How "control" affects suicidal ideation

[Daft-Bear]

I would like to discuss the aspect of control in regards to suicidal ideation.

I know that personally, my suicidal ideation developed due to an inability to control my life, my future, and an inability to make sense of my past. When I express my views to others I am immediately invalidated which further adds to this feeling that even the things I have control over, like my mind, are actually out of control and wrong. When I write a suicide note, I am in control again and am able to keep going a bit longer. When I am deprived of control in any aspect of my life, I find the ideation heightens. Though I have never been admitted to a psych ward, I assume that would make things substantially worse. I remember when I was young, being dragged to therapists instead of being validated and heard which caused my depression to get out of control.

So that brings me to the topic I would like to discuss. How does control affect your ideation? Did your suicidal ideation stem from a lack of control? If not, what triggers your ideation?

 

[figure8]

My suicidal ideation didn't stem from the lack of control. However, control is what keeps me going - because it's up to me to choose how many more 'tomorows' I will have. I feel in control, and that makes me feel infintely so much better about staying alive.
I'm not sure if what I'm about to say is entirely correct, because I experience severe memory loss. By which I mean, most of my life is a blank, and all the memories I kept feel like scenes from a fantasy novel, like they're not actually mine. However, I think my suicidal ideation is directly connected to feeling humiliated. I was exposed to things I shouldn't have been exposed to as a child by my mother, and I think I wasn't able to become comfortable with my own sexuality. Because of that, I used to wish I had no genitalia (which, I assume, is not an average 14-year-old's thought). Topics concerning sexuality made me feel immensely ashamed. That shame spread through every layer of my life, and my being. Yes, I took "I feel so embarrassed I could die" to a whole other level. Obviously, that's not the only thing to trigger my ideation, and there are so many other aspects to the trauma I experienced, but most of the times when I catch myself actively thinking "I want to die," it's somewhat connected to me feeling humiliated. This might be also because I've never learned to cope with my feelings in a healthy way. Me being an excessively private person who views being open about anything concerning them as a reason to be ashamed doesn't really help with the issue. And yep, I will probably make myself feel upset because of posting this later on.
That was the part where I talked about my less rational side. Generally, though, I am more of a rationalist when it comes to suicide. The last thing I want is to let my temporary emotions influence me in the decision to commit suicide; to die because of how miserable my life is, or because of the chemical imbalance in my brain. Maybe I will never reach genuine happiness - and maybe there is no genuine hapiness in this world - but I want to die knowing I was a remarkable person. That's enough for me to feel content, and only then I will be sure it's time for me to go. You could say I'm more of an optimistic suicidal, which might be funny or even absurd to some, but I guess that's the kind of philosophy I live by. Seeing other people's posts on this forum makes me think my stance on suicide is somehow unique, but I hope you understand the point I'm trying to get across.

 

[FuneralCry]

Your feelings certainly are very much understandable to me, in my case I'm always dreading what lies ahead and I just see existence as being so dreadful in general, it's dreadful to endure an unpredictable existence where chance so cruelly determines everything and where there is unlimited potential to suffer endlessly.

I don't think there is any true control as long as one exists here and choosing to cease existing would be the only way to gain control for me but we exist in a world where that is cruelly made as difficult as possible for people where we are expected to be prisoners to this existence until we die anyway. But overall my wish to die is caused by the fact that existence itself is completely undesirable and repulsive, I view non-existence as always being preferable.